API, all that developers need...
MultiForecast is based on Sensor Observation Service (SOS), which indexes weather forecasts from various environmental providers at real time. MulitiForecast website provides a Graphical interface to access the data retrieved. In addition it is possible to access this data through an application interface (API).
MutliForecast API is based on Sensor Observation Service (SOS) server, which is used for managing deployed sensors (e.g. websites) and retrieving sensor data. More specifically, 52North the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) server is used , which is an official OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) implementation specification..
The API provides access to the environmental data crawled and retrieved at real time. More specifically, it contains measurements of weather forecast data (e.g. temperature, wind speed) for the geographical regions and time periods for which the crawling algorithms are enabled.
The current database includes information about:
The main methods of SOS that are used are: GetFeatureOfInterest, DescribeSensor, GetCapabilities
The basic components that can be found in the aforementioned functions are the following:
TimePeriod
Describes a time period using the following date format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+00 e.g 2011-03-23T00:00:00+00 and beginPosition and end Position tags.
offering
It refers to a specific phenomenon e.g. weather and it is used to describe what properties reside in the database
procedure
Sensors (or sites) that retrieve/ contain the information.
observedProperty
It refers to a specific phenomenon being observed e.g. temperature.
featureOfInterest
It refers to a specific area stored in the database. Some basic types are: point, line, polygon. Each of these types use points that represent the latitude, longtitude of a point on the map. For example, a polygon is depicted by its corners/ vertices followed by the first one.